shadows of echoes of memories of songs

It's been so long since I've posted anything of substance that I've basically forgotten how to do this. HOW DO I EVEN LIVEJOURNAL. So I'm just going to type and see what comes out, and then post it and then feel awful about it for a while and be avoidant about looking at the comments and oh you know how it goes.

Seriously, though, I feel like I literally don't remember how to write anything longer-form than a tweet. A series of tweets, maybe. "(1/3)". Like trying to make a speech while struggling to keep your head above water, shouting it out in gulps of air. It feels like the internet's all broken and polluted now anyway, no air between things; we didn't used to have a word for "content" when it was all content. Not that I was, of course. I guess in some ways I'm more content now, more settled -- or set -- in my ways, less inclined to stand for certain brands of bullshit. Oh god though listen to me, puffing out hot air like a pompous great wheezing walrus, "I am this, I am that", words, words, and do you see what I did there, and besides. Is any one of us not basically just wandering around in the dark? Maybe running our hands over the outlines of something half-perceived, or maybe just petulantly kicking something and hoping it isn't a wasps' nest?

I had a voice in here somewhere.

Memory goes, but not memories. I can't always remember the name of the thing any more. (It was all there, only the names were not.) Things I thought I had stored in my head turn out to be broken links, digital husks; but the fingertips of past relationships come reaching out of the mist, too too solid (oh, for goodness' sake, stop that, you are not Lord Hamlet (no, stop that, too)), and the old music gets louder, the needle returns to the -- no, don't force it, you can hear it if you just listen.

The bits that make sense are decoupling like a slow-motion explosion. Blow the bloody doors off and see all the people.

The things in my life I want to write about have too much backstory, they're compromised by context, they're anchored to things I can't say. They're shot through with the threads of other people's secrets, and untangling my own loose weave will mean unravelling other people's hidden seams. Everything is tied to someone else; sometimes it feels like every thing in the world is a place where something, a thing I was doing when. The smell of his aftershave, 10 years later, still makes me turn my head. The arms of his jumper around my shoulders. Hooks in my flesh.

Maybe if I stack up enough half-sentences they'll start becoming.

Happy new year! And a very belated merry Christmas, since I never posted anything for that either.

I think this is the last day I can legitimately get away with using my fruithat icon, even though ACTUALLY twelfth night is INTERESTINGLY not today but last night and we are already courting BAD LUCK by having taken the decorations down tonight. Anyway. It's 2014! There are a lot of 'review of the year' things going round but I already can't remember anything that happened last year. I spent the last 3 months of it with a hideous cough and the previous 3 months feeling faily about work and before that I have no idea, though I definitely read some books somewhere along the line.

I didn't really make any new year's resolutions this year either, which doesn't mean that I don't feel the need to improve anything in my life, but is more an indication of my current level of confidence in actually achieving anything, viz.: approximately zero. I made vague resolutions to go running more often and to have more fun, but have no idea how to go about achieving the latter and feel too apathetic to do the former (also at the moment it would be more like swimming anyway). In the meantime I guess I will read some more books and try to stop Img falling off anything particularly high.

There's feeling full of fail, and then there's feeling full of existential fail. I've spent most of today wanting to curl up under the desk in a little ball and howl like an over-tired toddler. I was working for the Department of Fail, which always saps my will to live -- they're not really inherently full of fail, but I and my colleague J. are contracted to work a few days for them and so all the problems they save up for us are the things that are either a) completely intractable and/or incomprehensible, b) sufficiently bitty and faffy that nobody has ever had a chance to sit down and really get them, or c) enormous cans of worms (these are invariably simple-looking tasks, and for all I know they may be given to us in all innocence, but they turn out to be many-headed sharp-fanged fail-hydras from the Dark Places). It doesn't help that the DoF is also located in a vast open-plan office, flickery-fluorescent-lit, and dry as a desert; being there makes me feel exhausted and drained and even more queasy than I was already starting to feel.

[Yes, I know I'm lucky to have a job at all, and I shouldn't complain. And I know I'm lucky that I'm not suffering (yet, so far) from all the horrible things that can go wrong in pregnancy, so I should be practically rejoicing at tiredness and a bit of recurring queasiness. And depression is all in the mind so it can't be that bad. And the Tories will fix everything if we just let them get on with it.]

Today was a day of cans of worms involving ( javascript and CMS horrors )

During all this fail-wrestling I was keeping a vague eye on twitter in the hope of getting some voices of sanity filtering in through all the madness, but in fact it just made things worse: it was a non-stop stream of rants and shouting, flickering away in the background like the last TV fuzzily broadcasting the apocalypse, showing the world falling apart while I was stuck inside designing better deckchairs for the Titanic. And outside it got darker and colder and I didn't want to stay in the Department of Fail but I didn't want to go out into the cold either, and every time I get home I feel like I don't ever want to go out again, but every time I look around me here I feel as though everything is a reminder of some kind of brokenness (inside or out) which I should have either fixed or got rid of, and I want to hide from it, and there's nowhere left to hide except going to bed, and even that doesn't help because I'm uncomfortable and I sleep badly, and going to sleep just means waking up into another day of fail.

And there's not enough time left before everything runs out of time. Working days, days before Christmas, days before the baby arrives ... days before the end of something, of everything. When I die they'll cut me open and find nothing inside but small charred fragments of to-do lists.

This is going to be One Of Those Posts. Last chance to look away now.

( I lost myself I cannot speak )

I swear if one more person has a go at me for being unhappy about our boiler having broken down (along the lines of "Surely you wouldn't put the heating on this early in the year anyway?" with optional extra snark of "I thought you were one of those green/eco-warrior/hippy types?") I will not be held responsible for the violence of my response.

Our house has basically no insulation apart from the double glazing. There are blinds instead of curtains in most of the rooms. Yes, these are things we need to fix, but we only moved in 8 weeks ago, we only have finite amounts of money, there are only 24 hours in a day and we both work full-time. Our energy usage has been consistently much lower than the national average for the last few years, and we're still working to decrease it further. We don't fly, we don't drive, we don't have a vast home cinema, we don't run servers at home that have to be on all the time. I'm not suggesting we're some kind of saints, but we're already doing a lot to reduce unnecessary energy use. We don't generate much waste.

No, I wouldn't have the heating on all the time at the moment (all the time we're there, I mean -- obviously I wouldn't have it on when we're out!), though I would use hot water for washing (and I bet all the people who are having a go at me do too). Yes, I can wear extra jumpers. Yes, I can wear gloves in the house. Yes, I can make cups of tea and wrap my hands around them. But I'm sleeping in two layers of thermals with a hot water bottle and I'm still cold at night, the floors are cold even with socks and slippers, my toes are usually numb, and there's a deep cold in the air that makes me even more tired and miserable than I already am. Also, in cold conditions my extremities basically stop circulating properly (Reynaud's syndrome). Fingerless gloves don't really help, and there is a limit to what I can do when I'm wearing full gloves. I'd do more baking (which would help to heat the kitchen and adjoining living room) but we don't have a working oven, and when we use the hob (portable one-ring electric) or toaster it sets the smoke alarm off, and Owen doesn't like any of the food I make so cooking is always just misery anyway. Maybe we should be living and sleeping in one room, and blocking up all the doorways, nailing blankets over the windows, eating nothing but porridge (he doesn't mind that). Maybe there are better ways to fix the problem more permanently. Every morning I cycle along the towpath, and most mornings I find myself wondering if one quick and straightforward way to save energy and solve a whole host of other problems into the bargain would be to fill my pockets with heavy stones and just cycle straight off the path into the river.

I was thinking about trying to do a post a day for October instead of the now-traditional NaNoNoNoNoNoThere'sNoQualityControl November thing, but the Black Dog of depression got me by the ankle and wouldn't let go. However, consider this a slightly delayed, slightly bruised and slightly frayed-metaphorical-trousered opening to the slightly tedious (for reader if not for writer, and that's a big if) task of trying to post something every day in October. Why? Because I want to get back into the habit of writing; because I have a few things I want to talk about; because you've got to do something other than sit in the dark rocking gently and chewing on a teabag, sometimes, haven't you? ... haven't you?

Part of the reason for the unexpected and unwelcome Act of Dog was the ongoing restructuring shenanigans which seem to be going on at work. I didn't expect to be so unsettled by what is effectively just a minor internal game of musical chairs, it's not as if my job is at risk (or if it is, then there are plenty of people ahead of me in the firing-line) but a) some of the specifics of the intended reshuffle didn't look like much fun from my point of view (likely move to less-interesting work; possible change of line-manager to someone I would probably find harder to work for/with) and b) more importantly, the ongoing uncertainty, rumour-mongering and indecision was making me feel as though everything was provisional, everything was planning-blighted, and everything was more pointless than usual. Being given the impression that it's not worth starting anything long-term is not good for motivation or avoiding avoidance. But a big part of the problem was that it felt as though the whole question was hanging on the whim of one or two people, and my attempts to ask serious questions about how those people were going to decide how to redraw the lines (show working!) were all met with "it's obvious, we'll take everything into consideration" (what, everything, including the completely irreconcilable wishes of lots of irrational individuals?), "how should I know?" (well, duh, it's your job to know, that's why you get paid 10K a year more than I do) and "oh, stop taking everything so seriously".

It was the last of these that upset me most, really, because a) it was said by someone whose opinion of me matters somewhat more than it should (~sigh~) and b) I really don't see myself as the sort of person who takes everything deadly seriously -- quite the opposite! I worry that sometimes I'm too quick to jump for a pun (usually innuendo) and don't always think whether it'd be better to keep my mouth shut; I'm not labouring under the delusion that what I do all day counts for tuppence in the much-vaunted Grand Scheme of Things (why isn't this Grand Scheme documented anywhere, eh?), and I don't make much secret of the fact. It is all a game; if we make a mess of it, nobody dies. But if a game is being played, I want to try to play the game, or just say "no thanks, I'd rather not play" -- not sit on the sidelines sniping at the participants, or play in a way that spoils the fun for everybody else; if I'm playing, I'll try to play within the context of the rules (playing by the rules is not breaking the rules; playing within the context of the rules is breaking them only in ways which will be understood by the participants as breaking the rules -- it's the difference between slipping an ace up your sleeve and, say, breaking up the card table with an axe, or getting up and going to the pub instead without a word of apology when it's my turn to play). I guess I do take what I do seriously, in the sense that I try to do it to the best of my limited abilities; and that applies to the process of working as well as the individual tasks of work. If you're going to have a meeting at all, don't make it a waste of everybody's time; if you're going to write project plans and report back to someone on progress, you have to at least pretend that the reports mean something. Otherwise it's like running a roleplaying game where people can just say "What are you talking about? You didn't cast a spell on me, you just rolled a couple of dice". You have to have some kind of collective suspension of disbelief; you have to believe in the fourth wall, even just a little bit, in order to break it successfully.

Maybe for some people it is more fun to undermine the game to the extent that nobody can enjoy playing it. Maybe that's their game. I don't want to play their game. But not wanting to play their game is a move in their game. (R. D. Laing totally had this one nailed. I wouldn't dream of trying to compete.)

So, I don't like being called humourless; and I don't like feeling that everything I spend my day doing is under some kind of managerial planning blight. But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln...?

Perhaps you're hoping that all this was a digression and that the real point of the post would be How I Made The Black Dog Lose Its Grip (in which the Heroine kicks the DOG in the teeth & sends it Howling into the Outer Darkness without so much as scuffing her patent-leather SHOES, &c), but no. It's still scratching at the door, and work still feels like an unstructured mess, and I'm still feeling as frayed as those metaphorical trousers (or should that be TROUSERS). The ability to weave a spun-sugar web of words around the problem doesn't change the hard centre. Traces, as they persist in saying, of nuts.

Of course, thinking about it probably makes it worse. I guess the same goes for writing about it.

Perhaps I shouldn't take everything so seriously.

Sorry I've not said much lately. We're a week away from moving house and I'm in a state of neurotic despair about the whole thing. ( And I'm going to tell you about it in tedious detail whether you like it or not. )